Letícia Cesarino

THE INSIDE OUT WORLD: TRUTH AND POLITICS IN THE DIGITAL ERA

01 March 2023

“Is a statement fact or fiction, original or copy? Who is an agent and who is a patient? Is such behavior spontaneous or manipulated, public or private? Is this person’s intention authentic or spurious? Who can I trust?” In a world where the internet has become massively disseminated, becoming the main arena for political communication in several countries, these questions we ask on a daily basis are signs of the rise of processes such as populism, post-truth, denialism and conspiracism. In O Mundo do Avesso: Verdade e Política na Era Digital (The Inside Out World: Truth and Politics in the Digital Era), anthropologist Letícia Cesarino offers an innovative perspective to read these phenomena, commonly explained by political, economic or situational causes. She proposes a ‘four fields’ approach to online anti-structural publics, based on a new reading of Gregory Bateson’s cybernetics , which allows us to see these processes in their technical dimension, as a system that works through dynamics of stabilization, crises, inversions, polarizations and new reorganizations, demonstrating the complexity behind the recent digitalization of politics and truth.

Letícia Cesarino is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. She holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, and currently co-coordinates a mixed-methods project with the Digital Humanities Lab at the Federal University of Bahia, with the aim of monitoring and analyzing far right Telegram publics in Brazil.

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